Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Australia

Jess Cadwallader is a second year doctoral candidate in Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Australia, supervised by Dr Nikki Sullivan. Her thesis uses a Levinasian ethics, as well as the works of Foucault, Derrida, Diprose and Merleau-Ponty, to examine the construction of the experience of suffering, and its place within discourses of bodily modification. Her work has been positively received at numerous Australian and international conferences, including the Body Modification: Mark II Conference, the Identity Matters Conference and the Third Annual Association for Medical Humanities Conference (Treliske, UK).

There is an often unconsidered term which comes up over and over again in discourse about bodily alteration and ‘enhancement,’ and yet is often used as justification for such practices: suffering. It is the relief of suffering that has been used to justify, for example, the painful limb-lengthening surgery undergone by some Little Persons (amongst others); the prescription of medications to those with a growth hormone deficiency, or ADHD; the surgical ‘fixing’ of ambiguous genitals of intersex children; and even, often, the ‘augmentation’ of the breasts of some women. Suffering is taken to be a priori a bad thing, a position which, in assuming that bodily being is assumed to be natural and neutral, all too often precludes critical engagement with both the experience of suffering and the role it plays in the discourses that surround, form and inform technological intervention in the body. This paper begins to address this issue, acknowledging the importance of suffering and the responsibility to relieve it, but also critically engaging with suffering, exploring how and why it arises where and when it does in the context of current Western culture.

Consideration of these issues takes place against the background of French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s explorations of the intercorporeal formation of the embodied subject, More specifically, I use Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the ‘bodily tolerance.’ This concept helps to trace the ways in which certain constructions of embodied subjectivity are attended by the formation of bodily tolerances, which if transgressed cause suffering. In this paper, I explore some of the discourses – such as the imperative to be ‘better than well’ identified by Carl Elliott – that contribute to current Western modes of subjectivity and bodily tolerances, attending particularly to the place of difference.  I argue that when corporeal difference (recast as deviance, disease or pathology in relation to a culturally specific norm) is taken to be the cause of suffering, it is the removal of that difference which is alleged to relieve suffering. As a result, these investigations demonstrate some of the reasons that the majority of the technologies available for bodily alteration are currently used primarily for ‘normalisation’ or its counterpart, ‘enhancement.’